From CNN Audio, this is the assignment.

I'm Audie Cornish.

Since the former president of the United States faces 91 felony counts in four criminal cases in four states,

you're forgiven for losing track of the state of play when it comes to Trump legal cases.

And lost in the mountain of other news are reports that key Trump allies

are starting to take plea deals or testify against him, names that have shocked people who

do watch these cases closely.

So today on the assignment, Who is Flipping and Why?

Caitlin Polance, CNN's senior reporter on the crime and justice beat has a cheat sheet for us.

Welcome to the show. Hi. You have a lot of notes. I always have a lot of notes. There's a long history here of people flipping on Donald Trump in criminal cases. All right. So I couldn't figure out, I'm like, should we talk about this by case? You know what I mean? Or by group. So we're going to do it by group. The first group I'm going to call the Cracken. The term Cracken is it's actually a Scandinavian Sea Monster because I went and looked it up. But the reason why it's a political meme is because of Sidney Powell, who was a one-time associate, possible attorney for the former

president. And she herself used the term back on Lou Dobbs tonight in 2020 to talk about

their effort to fight election fraud, so to speak. It's been organized and conducted with the help of Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies,

the social media companies, and even the media companies.

And I'm going to release the crackin.

The idea of the crackin was that Trump had this machine that was going to fight for him.

And of course, later on, they lost, what, 60, 70?

60-some lawsuits, yeah.

And Citi Powell was behind some of them.

And at that time where she was releasing the crack in, that was when the big push was in court.

I mean, there was a lot of disinformation around the election that people like her were perpetuating, but her work as a lawyer was sort of central to the idea

of every time she was out there publicly saying, we're releasing the Krakken. The Krakken was,

we're suing, we're going to the mat on this. So I put everybody who was like fighting this fight on

...